Kick Start Your Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing.

As a business owner your content marketing strategy should be the core of your social media marketing strategy. Without content you don’t have anything to use, to market your business on social media with, and without social media you often don’t have a good way to get your content notice quickly. Therefore, content marketing and social media marketing go hand in hand.

As a business owner, content marketing is a tactic you should use to inform, educate and entertain your target audience. When used in conjunction with your social media content, it is also used to interact with your target audience. Social media includes such things as social networks, message boards, discussion forums, as well as blogs with opened commenting. By combing the two you can increase website traffic, leads and ultimately sales. As with most things to do with business, you need to have a plan in place, and follow that plan to see good results.

The number one reason business owners give up with this form of marketing is time, business owners are busy running their businesses and content marketing and social media marketing take time, and giving up before you see the results you expect is all too comment. If you truly want to expand your efforts, there are some things you can do right now to help.

Hire Help with Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing

That right, you can outsource most of what you do in the social media arena. Someone else can share relevant content with your target audience, while you focus on important comments to make it more personal if you like. You can also outsource most of your content production needs. Someone can ghost write your blog posts, articles, and even message board posts. You can focus on keeping the discussion alive by commenting in real time.

Get Active

You may be spending so much time handling customer service issues or other similar type business issues that you don’t have time to get involved. Outsource these service, get a virtual assistant and get busy being interactive with your social networks. The more active you are, the more trust you’ll build and the more shares, likes, and interaction you will get.

Use Sponsored Updates

Sponsored posts (Facebook.com), sponsored updates (LinkedIn.com), promoted tweets (Twitter.com), etc… can be used to promote your brand. The best use of sponsored updates is to use them to lead people to powerful content that has a strong call to action, especially a “sign up now” action rather than a “buy now” action. If you can use sponsored posts to capture more email addresses, you’ll be able to market to those people in the long term.

Increase the Forms Your Content Takes

You have photos, videos, podcasts, eBooks, articles, blog posts and more to choose from. Use a variety of different forms of content in order to make the shares you post on social media more exciting. No one wants to look endlessly at just text, and no one can listen to and watch video all the time, so mix it up as best you can.

Reposition your Content

If you have written a series of blog posts on a particular subject, collate them together and make yourself an eBook, if you produce videos regularly consider taking the audio segment out and making this a podcast, you can also transcribe the audio and generate a whole series of blog posts. A lot of successful content marketeers do just this, to make one piece of content work over and over again in many different forms, there is nothing stopping you doing the same.

Involve Everyone

Social Media Marketing and Content Marketing can and should be undertaken by as many people in your organisation as possible. You shouldn’t leave it to the marketing or sales manager. With good training and suitable guidelines in place, everyone can make updates in the name of the company, answer discussions, and write and plan content for blogs, articles, eBooks, etc… in fact you’ll end up with a broad range of opinions all aimed at engaging your target audience.

What Do I Do

Now, I’m a small business owner and my business is helping other businesses identify attainable goals online and then working with then to achieve this using website design, content and online marketing. Content Marketing forms a large part of my marketing activities along with social media marketing, each day I produce and publish at least one blog post, this is automatically posted to our website. As each post is posted it is automatically pushed to all of my social media channels. I also have my website set up so that it automatically sends a tweet of a past blog post every 30 minutes, this means that 48 tweets are sent each day automatically and these are constantly generate retweets, new followers and new website visitors. I use hootsuite to interact easily with all my social media channels, and I login to Google plus each day… Further I use eBooks to capture email addresses and I have my website set up to automatically send out my newsletter on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. As you can see, I’ve streamlined it an awful lot, if you also consider that I use and build into website specialist SEO tools … you’ll start to realise just how successful content marketing and social media marketing can be together.

The important takeaway is to expand your content sharing on social media and your interaction on your blog by sharing the load. This will work to increase awareness of your business, boost traffic, and sales without running you into the ground and if you can’t share it, automate much of it like I have.

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I've been marketing and building websites since 1994 and this experience grows and matures as I do. I have come up with a range of website packages that will allow most businesses to: